Saturday, March 09, 2013

Hamid Dabashi asks: What happens with thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical 'pedigree'?

......Why is European philosophy "philosophy", but African philosophy
ethnophilosophy, the way Indian music is ethnomusic - an ethnographic
logic that is based on the very same reasoning that if you were to go to
the New York Museum of Natural History (popularised in Shawn Levy's Night at the Museum [2006]),
you only see animals and non-white peoples and their cultures featured
inside glass cages, but no cage is in sight for white people and their
cultures - they just get to stroll through the isles and enjoy the power
and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants,
Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans, etc, all in a single winding row.....The question of Eurocentricism is now entirely blase. Of course
Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point,
and why should they not? They are the inheritors of multiple (now
defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of
those empires and they think their particular philosophy is "philosophy"
and their particular thinking is "thinking", and everything else is -
as the great European philosopher Immanuel Levinas was wont of saying -
"dancing".

The question is rather the manner in which non-European thinking can
reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of
whatever European philosophers may think of themselves for the world at
large, but for the purpose of offering alternative (complementary or
contradictory) visions of reality more rooted in the lived experiences
of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America - counties and climes
once under the spell of the thing that calls itself "the West" but
happily no more....